Human Nature in Politics eBook

churchmen are aware, and all Irishmen by facts which
most Englishmen try to forget. The student of
politics must therefore read history, and particularly
the history of those events and habits of thought
in the immediate past which are likely to influence
the generation in which he will work. But he must
constantly be on his guard against the expectation
that his reading will give him much power of accurate
forecast. Where history shows him that such and
such an experiment has succeeded or failed he must
always attempt to ascertain how far success or failure
was due to facts of the human type, which he may assume
to have persisted into his own time, and how far to
facts of environment. When he can show that failure
was due to the ignoring of some fact of the type and
can state definitely what that fact is, he will be
able to attach a real meaning to the repeated and
unheeded maxims by which the elder members of any generation
warn the younger that their ideas are ‘against
human nature.’ But if it is possible that
the cause was one of mental environment, that is to
say, of habit or tradition, or memory, he should be
constantly on his guard against generalisations about
national or racial ‘character.’

One of the most fertile sources of error in modern
political thinking consists, indeed, in the ascription
to collective habit of that comparative permanence
which only belongs to biological inheritance.
A whole science can be based upon easy generalisations
about Celts and Teutons, or about East and West, and
the facts from which the generalisations are drawn
may all disappear in a generation. National habits
used to change slowly in the past, because new methods
of life were seldom invented and only gradually introduced,
and because the means of communicating ideas between
man and man or nation and nation were extremely imperfect;
so that a true statement about a national habit might,
and probably would, remain true for centuries.
But now an invention which may produce profound changes
in social or industrial life is as likely to be taken
up with enthusiasm in some country on the other side
of the globe as in the place of its origin. A
statesman who has anything important to say says it
to an audience of five hundred millions next morning,
and great events like the Battle of the Sea of Japan
begin to produce their effects thousands of miles off
within a few hours of their happening. Enough
has already occurred under these new conditions to
show that the unchanging East may to-morrow enter upon
a period of revolution, and that English indifference
to ideas or French military ambition are habits which,
under a sufficiently extended stimulus, nations can
shake off as completely as can individual men.